Premiere Ratings: $#*! My Dad Says, Outsourced, My Generation

It seems that so much of the premiere week analysis has been "how did the show do relative to its big lead-in?" I don't really remember it being that way last year, but... yeah. Two of today's three premieres fall under that blanket as well.

• The $#*! My Dad Says premiere is going to have an outside chance at being premiere week's biggest series premiere outright, and its 3.9 demo in the prelims has it tied for that honor with Mike & Molly and Hawaii Five-0 at the moment. This came out of a very impressive 4.8 premiere for The Big Bang Theory, meaning it looks like it'll lose ~20%. 3.9 is obviously pretty great, but a 20% loss in the 8:30 half-hour, where there's one of the biggest jumps in Households Using TV (HUT), is something to watch out for going forward. If it continues to lose only 20% of Big Bang, though, this show isn't going anywhere. I predicted a 4.2 demo out of a 5.0 TBBT, so I was in the ballpark.

• Same can be said of NBC's Outsourced, whose 3.5 demo is just a tick behind The Event for the largest on NBC, but it's not nearly as impressive as The Event was because of the 4.3 demo from lead-in The Office. It's still one of the largest premiere numbers of the week, but as with the above show (just don't want to write all those symbols again, sorry), the pressure is a little higher with the big lead-in, so it won't want to drop too far. It did three ticks worse than Community's 3.8 premiere in the half-hour last season, and The Office was a bit weaker (4.1) last year. I predicted a 3.3, so I was close again, but I thought The Office would do more than a half point worse than it did.

• What a lot of people have said in past years about ABC premiere week is that they can get people to show up but not to stay. Flashforward, V, and Eastwick all debuted well last fall (though to varying degrees) and then dropped a long, long way. Even Cougar Town, into its second full season and from where I'm sitting not in much danger, has never approached the heights of its 4.4 demo start. This year, though, ABC can't even get people to show up. My Generation's 1.6 demo puts it barely ahead of The Whole Truth from the night before, it tied CDub competitor The Vampire Diaries in A18-49, and once again there's not much hope. (I predicted a 2.1 in my 22 Hours article, and while I'm not making excuses, based on some previous premieres I probably would've predicted lower.) That means Detroit 1-8-7 is the net's strongest drama premiere by far at merely a 2.3, and perhaps that increases its chances for an extension. And the net's focus shifts toward next week as they hope for much better things out of the upcoming premiere of No Ordinary Family.